Saturday, February 03, 2007

War is a Calamity, News at Eleven!

Some may wonder why so much ink is spilled hereabouts on the possibility of a war with Iran, or the war in Iraq.

It is certainly more than just oil being a strategic resource. That isn't the only angle. One cannot be certain that Cheney started World War Three simply for oil. Reasons don't really matter. Perhaps Cheney is so callow a man that burnishing his Halliburton Stock options shall at last be his measure.

Causality is irrelevant. This war must be blotted out.

The world is tiny now. It is smaller than my cramped office. If I set out in a canoe desperately seeking a better life at risk of slumbering with the jellyfish (china or bust) it is unquestionable that I would meet a woebegone soul paddling from the other direction. The sense of frontier and mystery is fleeing this globe as the mother dough expands to fill the pan.

Two crisis loom, one acute - - Peak Oil and energy, and one chronic - - that being Violent Climate Change.

In both cases, time is not unlimited to address the problems head on, squarely.

Yet the stupidly expanding conflict in the Middle East threatens our ability as a race to fix the problems we need to fix. This may seem overly dramatic, to the average American, who have suffered no more than price inflation at the supermarket as the war in the Iraq region has drained millions of barrels of oil monthly from our finite resource base into a hazy blue sky.

The incalculable hatred we have bred in the hearts of one hundred generations of Iraqis pales when compared to the possible outcome of a full spectrum bombing run on Iran.

What happens if Iran blockades the Persian Gulf with their missiles? Answer. A shockwave is generated that leads directly to food rationing and economic collapse in such first world countries as the US of A.

China will shortly decide that the time to hold Dollar reserves is at an end, and with three carrier groups tied halfway across the world, Tawian is a beckoning prize of opportunity.

Russia shuts off her methane taps again, driving home the jui-jutsu lesson of twenty-first century warfare.

Nigeria might then explode as all the foreign hornets fly the nest to protect the queen.

You're telling me that this shit is occuring and we're interring carbon at the same time? We're funding Amory B. Lovins to re-write building codes for the world? We're teaching former Squalid-Mart employees to become organic farmers? While people are rioting in the streets and being hosed down with microwaves?No. The answer is no.

Stop the war or lose the world. Time is not unlimited.

Peak oil is visible in the rear-view mirror and ethanol is still a fucking joke. This is no rant, "this is reality."

WASHINGTON -- Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. national security adviser, told Congress the war in Iraq is a calamity and likely to lead to "a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large."

Testifying before the Senate foreign relations committee Thursday, Brzezinski skewered U.S. administration policy as driven by "imperial hubris" and a disaster on historic, strategic and moral grounds.

While other former U.S. officials and ex-generals have criticized administration policy in committee hearings, none savaged it to the degree Brzezinski did.

"If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, and I emphasize what I am about to say, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large," said the security adviser in the Democratic administration of former president Jimmy Carter.

He set out as a plausible scenario for military collision: Iraq failing to meet benchmarks set by the administration, followed by accusations Iran is responsible for the failure, then a terrorist act or some provocation blamed on Iran, culminating in so-called defensive U.S. military action against Iran.

That, Brzezinski said, would plunge the United States into a spreading quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Proposing a massive shift in policy, Brzezinski, who holds a senior position at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the United States should announce unambiguously its determination to leave Iraq "in a reasonably short period of time."

Second, he said, the United States should announce it is undertaking talks with Iraqi leaders to jointly set with them a date by which U.S. military disengagement should be completed.

Instead, he said, the administration is developing a mythical, historical narrative to justify the case for a protracted and potential expanding war.

Initially based on false claims Iraq had secret arsenals of weapons of mass destruction, Brzezinski said "the war is now being redefined as the decisive ideological struggle of our time, reminiscent of the earlier collisions with Nazism and Stalinism."